Cegeka

Trusted Cloud solutions from a high tech data centre

In its new data centre in Geleen, Cegeka has now started installing the first IT systems for the private cloud of the Belgian ICT service provider. When these systems are operational, the energy-efficient and environmentally friendly data centre is ready to receive the first customer systems. This is expected to start in January 2016. The data centre is owned by ICTroom; Cegeka has an exclusive 'data centre as a service contract' with this company for a prolonged period.

Cegeka is an independent IT service provider with customers throughout Europe to help with them with their digital transformation, agility development, trusted cloud solutions and 24/7 managed services. Cegeka has branches in Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

ICTroom offers Cegeka data centre-as-a-service

Rik Sanders | Computable

In 2014 Cegeka decided to build a new data centre in the Netherlands, designed and built by ICTroom. Every now and then Marco Witteveen, CEO of Cegeka Netherlands, gets asked why his company has built this data centre in Geleen. There are still plenty of datacentres, why would you choose to have this build in these times? "That's true, but we believe that must be able to show your customers that you can run a data centre and take the final responsibility. In addition, some customers want a supplier from a privacy consideration point of view alone that has its own data centre. That inspires confidence. "

Innovative

Honoré du Puy, Director of ICTroom, explains that the data centre is owned by his company and that Cegeka is delivered data centre capacity 'as a service'. "It's a customized solution that is delivered as a service to Cegeka, including managing the underlying infrastructure. In addition Cegeka places its own managed platform to manage applications of its customers. "

According to Du Puy, this is an innovative concept for the data centre market: it is a sustainable data centre as a service offering where the customer chooses where he wants to have the data centre service delivered. "We fully focus on this concept, also abroad, such as in Belgium, England and South Africa. It creates an alternative to the large data centres, including Equinix, Interxion and TelecityGroup, where customers must come to them to rent rooms there. Our concept allows customers to choose the location for their own datacentre and they take it - often as single tenant - as a service.

Any place, anywhere?

The durable, modular build data centre in Geleen is a Tier 3 location and acts as each other’s backup with the data centre in Hasselt. The choice of Geleen was more or less constrained. Cegeka actually wanted to go to Eindhoven, but the company could not get a data connection directly into Hasselt. This had to be done via Antwerp, so the latency would be too high. That problem did not exist in Geleen. An additional advantage is that the location is near the German market, which is beneficial for the Cegeka branches in Germany.

Efficient

The new data centre has a scalable design according to ICTroom’s so-called IMD concept. It will have a capacity of 750 kW per module with room for blocks of 160 racks. The investment amounted to roughly ten million euro.

ICTroom and Cegeka have chosen the most efficient components for both the electrical infrastructure and the cooling system currently available. For example, a redundant cooling system cools the data centre with cold outside air with the aid of the indirect-Air2Air principle of Denco Happel. The energy consumption of the cooling system is thereby reduced by a factor of seven.